From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Genius is (possibly) the presence of more- or more closely packed- neurons. I once held a chunk of Einstein's brain, the scientist who was dissecting and analysing it told me the neurons were closer together. We don't really know if that makes thinking faster… but when I sit with true brilliant people and watch them have conversations, they seem to have the ability to recall important bits of information, put the puzzles together, and see patterns faster.
Today's workers don't want their own reputation soiled by working for a company that doesn't have a good reputation. They want to feel their work has meaning, and the companies they work for have a purpose.
Those cycles don't exist – that's not what history is like. Disasters keep coming along at random intervals, they are not normally distributed... That's hard for our brains to deal with… we don't like the idea that history is just a lot of random shocks without any predictable features.
Research has shown that learning brings more joy than material rewards. In a study where participants were given money for doing well on a task, they felt happiest not when they received the money, but when they learned something new about the task.
What they found was that people thought the person with the whiter, straighter teeth looked healthier, younger, more well educated. Just the teeth. Same person. Whiter, straighter teeth. Everything else was the same.
Bubbles are driven by people piling into ideas now, that they think will make them lots and lots of money in the future. The more people that pile in, the more quickly innovation can spread... But if the capital is misallocated? then when the money meets common sense, you get a bust.
You have to go into a very quiet place in your mind, away from the noise of the world, the noise of doubters, insecurities and your own self. You have to quiet your disbelief and create open mindedness to your own ability to succeed and overcome.
We keep getting told we need to be living our best life- but we forget we already are. We have a weird epidemic of hating on ourselves, if we stopped doing that, life would get way easier.
I believe success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness. To set fame as an objective can be likened to voluntarily stepping into a fire, with the inevitable outcome of being consumed.
Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.
I don't believe social media has transformed the essence of our social dynamics; rather, it has introduced a novel arena for the age-old status games we've always played. Human social interactions are fundamentally structured around three types of status games: dominance, virtue, and competence.
You cannot get a breakthrough, you cannot get a change nor a transformation unless you are willing to take that risk by stepping into the unknown. If getting the possibility requires going through uncertainty, they are two sides of the same coin.